“Every renaissance comes to the world with a cry, the cry of the human spirit to be free.”

- Anne Sullivan Macy

Good point, Anne.  chak has also noticed that at first, more often than not, that cry is simultaneously misinterpreted and disregarded by those who fall within its radius of influence.  Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon in modern history is the birth of Jazz which coincided with the birth of both the 20th Century and Louis Daniel Armstrong.  While many today acknowledge Pops’ place as the bestest to ever do the damn thing, his early steps towards greatness (much like those of his chosen art form and the century he lived through) went largely unheralded.  True luminaries don’t just get ignored though, they usually receive a face full of derision and ridicule for their troubles… and they wouldn’t have it any other way.

Many American ‘musical scholars’ of the late 19th/early20th centuries busied themselves searching for the ‘next big thing’ in music, or more specifically… the next Mozart, Bach or Beethoven.  They reasoned that the arrival of these sorts of musical giants – the kind of characters who literally change the way people think about musical expression, could be measured cyclically with some regularity.  Comparable to the ongoing search for the next Dalai Lama or American Idol, these aging, grey bearded fellows locked away in their Fortissimo Of Solitude weren’t totally off the mark.  In fact they were onto something pretty solid.  They were just looking in the wrong place.  As they futzed about, sorting through the emerging classical composers of Europe and portending the death of ‘cultured’ music, Satchmo cooled his heels at establishments like Pete Lala’s and the Funky Butt where he was most likely first introduced to musical giants of the day like Joe “King” Oliver.  In every way possible, Louis Armstrong was invisible to these so-called scholars which is part of what allowed him to develop and express the gift he was bestowed with in such a way that he transformed the global musical landscape forever.  As our neighbor Ray-Ray so wisely said after a long day in an exterminator’s jump suit, through a mouthful of Funyons… “Mang I’m tellin’ ya chayk… some bastards you JUS’ CAIN’T KILL”  Ray-Ray is money with that shit too, so we tend to pretty much pick up whatever he’s puttin’ down.

Look around today and ask yourself.. who are the current ’scholars’ looking for the ‘next big thing.’  Who is proclaiming the ‘death‘ of various things/ideas/people.  Who are the antiquated has-beens trying desperately to kick over the right rock before someone else does, merely to say they were the owner of the shoe that made first contact?  What are they missing?  Does it even matter?  When was the last time you heard someone mention Bix Beiderbecke?  Exactly. How about Pointcast or Flooz?  Exactlier.

It is within this generalized and malleable milieu that we find ourselves contemplating the ever evolving relationship between human beings and the word.  So much emphasis is placed on media like music, film and/or games in our digitally deliverable era that sometimes it’s easy to forget… none of these other forms of entertainment would be possible without the mighty word.  So perhaps it’s a little strange that it took as long as it did to get to where we are now.  Perhaps not.  Regardless, it seems to chak that the ‘next big thing’ those wizened veterans of the information age are completely missing is, once again, right in front of their truculent, myopic faces.

Ever since TheProject.html pissed up an FTP rope, the word has been free.  It just took us silly sheeples a couple of decades to wake up to that fact completely.  Before 1990 or so, words mostly existed in a controlled form… inside a book, magazine, newspaper or software program you paid for and owned physically.  You could also see them on places like signs, bumper stickers, t-shirts, 7-11 superhero-themed Slurpee cups and the like.  But the word wasn’t YOURS to do with as you pleased unless you were a bohemian scribe jotting haiku onto coffee shop napkins and leaving them behind for others to enjoy.  (Please stop doing that, by the way… it’s really annoying.)  Indeed, even the working writer was confined to the physical space, which really wasn’t so bad.  Things were simpler then.  Times were easier on the brain in many ways because if you regurgitated a few inches for your local bird-cage lining supplier, that’s where the words you wrote stayed.  These days, those same inches are ctrl-c/ctrl-v’d all the way around the globe and back again in the time it takes to ask ‘Can you email it to me?’  Those who write and publish words no longer control them or even have the most influence over them.  This is the era of The Reader and more broadly, The Consumer.  Those who consume the content control it, which is a complete reversal of how things have been done since… well… forever.

This turvey to the status-quo’s topsy will take another couple of decades to sort out at least, but the upshot for the consumers of content and specifically written words is that the content now bends to their will effortlessly.  Copyrights and walled gardens be damned.  Damned we say!  Don’t like it?  Tough.  It’s the same as not liking earthquakes or oxygen.  Remember Ray-Ray’s maxim. Shit’s done changed and like any change there are both positive and negative takeaways, depending on your perspective.  Maybe THE biggest positive wave inside this sea change is the rekindled love affair between human brains and the written word.  And as with any other online love connection, it tends to spill over into the ‘real’ world.  Much like consumers of ostensibly ‘pirated’ material are quickly being recognized as ALSO being great consumers of physical media, those who enjoy plowing through the binary breakers of words available online tend to be voracious readers IRL as well.  That means that traditional book sales of all literary flavors are booming.

Sure you can point to the explosion in the YA fiction space but that’s just one piece of the puzzle. chak has never even picked up a Harry Potter book but we give full credit to not only authors like Ms. Rowling but also the publishers, marketing departments and distributors who helped to make her breakout series (and others) such a wild success.  But think a little deeper… when did the first Potter book hit the shelves?  1997.  What other worldwide phenomenon hit its stride and roared into the zeitgeist like Lion Force Voltron that year?  The intertubes, kid.  Bloomsbury, Rowling’s publisher in the U.K. didn’t even have a website until `98.  But personal web spaces like Geocities, Tripod and Angelfire were already booming.  Hundreds of thousands of these transformed into a virtual promotion engine for this (already) ferociously popular character/series.  It was one of the first examples of a fan base coalescing online and utilizing the energy of enthusiasm for a product as a commodity amongst themselves, rather than taking it piecemeal from an approved source, one message at a time.  It was, in a word, electrifying.  Even those who weren’t on board the train felt the rumble as it hurtled through the public consciousness like a coal fired bat out of Mordor.  Suddenly people of ALL ages were proudly tucking books into the crook of their arms as they went about their day, to let others know they were fans.  This particular printed volume had become something akin to a status symbol.  To be fair, many derided this series as nothing more than a poorly written rehash of “tired cliches and dead metaphors.”    That sort of petty sniping, of course, completely misses the point.  These books were not literary triumphs by any stretch of the imagination but so what?  With the benefit of hindsight, Rowling can (literally) afford to laugh off criticism, literary or not, as… well…  hogwash.  Much like Mr. Armstrong, she flourished in the face of being judged prematurely by those who either didn’t understand her talent or simply wished she would go away.  As most reading these words are already aware, the film adaptations will be with us well into 2011 and probably beyond.  Never ones to miss an opportunity to milk a cash cow dry, the mainstream film industry is still riding that train that pulled out of the station more than a decade ago.  The franchise has created thousands upon thousands of new incomes and has been a financial boon for hundreds of thousands more.  All of this stems directly from the fans of one writer who realized that suddenly THEY controlled the word and could do with it as they pleased.  Collectively, much like their heroes between the pages, they linked arms and marched forth against the forces of chaos and entropy with their freshly minted power supporting and guiding them.  Reading, and by extension, the word… would never be the same.

Much less attention was given at the time, to the more nefarious practices made possible by this same revolution of consumption.  That’s mostly because the twin dervishes of the digital era – bandwidth and processor speed – had yet to really bulk up to their current formidability.  However, the seed had been sown and while Potter Moms busily registered new Evite accounts to organize wizard themed parties for their precocious, wand-waving enfant terribles – others (mostly on Usenet and IRC) were mulling the possibilities of how books could be consumed ONLINE and preferably for free.  They worked quietly, amongst themselves, the polar opposite of the public facing fan communities attached to one particular ad campaign or another.  They had also realized, fully, that they now controlled the word and had begun planning a jailbreak the likes of which probably sent Henry Houghton spinning in his modestly marked grave.  The fans had done their job.  They backed their M4 Sherman tank through the outer wall of Stalag Luft III while this new, nefarious bunch used that breach of security to slip in and affix TNT to the already weak foundation.  The shrapnel from that baby-go-boom is still hitting unsuspecting individuals in the face daily and not just in the publishing world.  The FREE word is still causing all KINDS of consternation and the bitching ain’t gonna end any time soon.

Consider Reading Rainbow. Outside of the R.I.F. program, which chak is old enough to remember, Reading Rainbow is by far the oldest and most successful nationally recognizable push to advocate reading among school age kids and young adults.  Or at least.. it was.  R.R. was just canceled due to a lack of funding as well as a noticeable shift in public policy towards educational programming focused on reading.  R.R. was all about getting kids excited to read and driving home the aspect of limitless adventure and wonder while one is absorbed in a good book.  That’s why we loved it so much.  Plus the theme song rocks and LeVar Burton is the freakin’ MAN.  Seriously… the main reason this show stayed around for so long was a combination of its knowing simplicity and the ebullient appeal of Mr. Burton.  He wasn’t afraid to get down on the level of the kids he was speaking to but it also never seemed too trite or forced.  So, while we’re sad to see the butterfly flitting up into the sky a final time… we have to ask ourselves, is there another unreferred to reason that the Rainbow melted away?  Who turned off the sprinkler?  Frankly, we blame Skittles, but then again we tend to blame them for everything.  We can spot pieces of Stalag Luft shrapnel in LeVar’s heart.  They took a while to work themselves in there good, but it finally happened.  Again is this a good or a bad thing?  We reject the characterization out of hand and merely see it as being an inevitable consequence of the word sidling up to its newfound masters.  Perhaps Reading Rainbow reached the goal it set out to accomplish.  More people and especially young adults are reading more than ever before.  Any way you slice it, R.R. had a good run and we’ll have it in syndication for decades.  Also, LeVar… you’re welcome to kick it with us and Ray-Ray any time you want.  We’ve got a whole bag of Funyons we haven’t even opened yet.  Better b.y.o.b. though.  Ray-Ray freaks out if you drink his beer.

So what’s the X factor driving this decided uptick in the popularity of the written word?  Why did it take so long for the little bastards to make if from the work camps to the open pastures of interwebz freedom?  It didn’t really.  It just took us a while to notice them building up around us.  Like a motley band of settlers cascading across the continental divide looking for gold and new opportunities in an unspoiled wilderness paradise, words found their new environment to be particularly inhospitable and therefore set about founding their own settlements, simultaneously making friends and starting wars with the natives, and generally speaking – just fucking shit up.  We don’t even mean that in a pejorative sense.  Society and mankind NEED to have their shit fucked up every so often to inspire growth and to promote maturation of the species as a whole.

For a super example of how the free word is still messing with peoples’ heads, please see the current and typically useless debate over “RSS vs. microblogging.”  The most noticeable sign that the people having the debate haven’t quite wrapped their brains around the true implications would be the insistence on framing the debate as “RSS vs.microblogging service X” where X = whatever the most popular service at the moment happens to be.  Another curious aspect of the word being free manifests itself in the mad rush to spew out AS MANY words as possible on an hourly basis.  Not only are professional and amateur bloggers often forced to file before they even have a chance to consider the basic efficacy of what they’ve just written…. millions of microbloggers fart out every thought that crosses their keyboards with zero reflection given to the content of those thoughts.  Sure there are exceptions but they are few and far between. For every Hot Five or Hot Seven there are a billion cold fish flopping around on the deck, gasping for artistic oxygen they simply can’t master.  But from that mass of scaly, wall eyed word junkies a certain kind of inevitable force of nature emerges. Every time the net gets dragged across the ocean floor, more of the frisky buggers come flooding in.  By their sheer force alone they prove that the word is free and in the hands of those who will do with it as they please, when and where they choose to do it.  That reminds us, we need to take Ray-Ray fishing soon.  Something tells us he’s a natural.

We digress but let’s really beat this fish analogy to death before we fillet it and fry it up.  Arguing about RSS being ‘better’  than microblogging (or vice-versa) is like a swordfish arguing with a sardine about what kind of wine they would prefer to be served with.  Really it’s a matter of taste.  One need not make a choice at all.  It’s just that certain people have a strong affinity for a good rosé and others will opt for a chardonnay.  You’re perfectly free to drink whatever you want, or not, and you most likely WILL depending on what day it is, what kind of mood you’re in and what is currently available to you.  The balance of the ocean ecosystem ensures that a healthy swordfish community will in turn translate into a richer environment for sardines to develop in.  The grapes that go into a rose’ don’t exist in a pink-tinged vacuum.  They would not be as well suited for their end product if there were not a plethora of grape varieties cultivated lovingly across the globe.  So it is with the free word online today.  Without the ubiquitous nature of RSS, would microblogging ever have blown up so big?  Without microblogging going off the chizain, would RSS have lasted as long as it has?  Both questions are certainly valid, yet ultimately extraneous because we can see that there is an obvious interdependence of the two.  Each makes the other stronger, better and a more viable options going forward.  We’re not the first to point this out, but it bears repeating as so many of those involved in the public discourse seem to be enamored of the notion that they must pick one horse in the race and ride it to the end, to the detriment of all others crammed into the starting blocks.  The control of digitized content, specifically the word, is not a zero sum game.  A microblog entry does not pull 140 words out of the RSS-sphere.  It ADDS them to the entire ocean of words that both formats utilize so well.

In the same way Louis set the note free inside the beat, the digital revolution has allowed a RenaSSaince of reading to occur over the past decade or so.  At first it was mostly visible via the explosion of popular YA lit books which inspired people of all ages to think of reading as cool again.  Now we can feel its tendrils of influence reaching into the way we live our lives minute to minute, connected to one another in a virtual sense.. by none other than the free & mighty word. Whether it’s a novel, a blog post (micro OR macro), an RSS feed, a FriendFeed, an email or an online version of a newspaper article, humans are not just READING more than ever before, we’re fetishizing the written word like it’s going out of style and nothing could be finer.  If RSS AND microblogging both winked out of existence tomorrow it wouldn’t matter a bit.  The old prison walls that used to hold the word in are long since demolished by the freedom fighters who seized the moment so many online moons ago, ensuring that we would all benefit at some point.  The same goes for other mediums of course.  The corpses of Napster and The Pirate Bay are nutrients to the soil of innovation.  Their days of glory and eventual waning of influence were essential to move the marker forward.  Long before media outlets, both on and offline, think to proclaim the ‘death’ of any given service or site, many new and improved options have sunk their roots deep into the true soil of the web.  The cycle doesn’t slow down, it only speeds up.  This means that the more you see/hear a megabrand mentioned by those speaking for massive media conglomerates and/or the rareified circle of online taste-makers, the closer it is to becoming irrelevant.  There are very occasional exceptions to this rule but in each case, the community in question has taken some sort of drastic measure of protection against this or has enjoyed the benefit of a loophole or fluke that was lost or not available to others.  After all… WWTDD?

Lastly it’s important to point out that the corporate entities who once controlled the word with an iron grip were among the first to figure all this out.  Nothing we just typed is a new thought and we’re quite aware of it.  The most obvious way of dealing with this conundrum for these behemoths of the business sector was and is to pick their poison.  The wave is gonna keep crashing on the shore of commerce no matter how tall you build the dike.  Better find a good wave to ride the sucker in on and minimize the damage as much as possible.  The latest tsunami in this world has been the Google Books initiative which has taken many by complete surprise, like a rogue wave screaming out of a perfect e-book storm towards the Amazon coastline.  Trust chak…. before it’s all over, bricked e-readers will be shat.  If you listen closely, you can hear the plopping from here.  Much like the aforementioned squabbles though, try to resist taking a side and just enjoy the fight.  No matter who wins, we all win.  We’re no longer subject to an oligarchy who controls words for us and doles them out sparingly for a premium price.  WE control the word now and nobody can change that.  The line between writer and reader is permanently blurred.  That’s a boon to both, albeit a potentially scary one for some.  And so the line between consumer and provider is irrevocably scattered to the winds as well.

Breathe in the sweet ocean air, baby…. sip your chardonnay… turn up the music and think to yourself…  what a wonderful world.  What a wonderful WORD.  It’s all yours now.  Yes I’m talking to you.  Take good care of it.  After all, it’s one of the most precious gifts you’ve ever received whether you use it or not.

“To infinity…. AND BEYOND!”

- Buzz Lightyear

chak just recently wrapped our minds around the terabyte… or more specifically the CONCEPT of being able to buy 1,000 gigs of storage for less than the cost of The Beatles: Rock Band SE bundle. Hell, these days (mid-2009) you can pick up two…. TWO terabytes for less than that. Times are pretty awesome for tech geeks and data nerds. We can casually perform computing functions with the flick of a wrist that Howard Aiken or Wesley Clark probably had wet dreams about.

So even though we here at chak central© are aware of larger format denotations, frankly we’re just having too much fun thinking in ‘terabytes’. We like the way the word sounds, it still impresses our less tech savvy acquaintances on occasion and we have this one friend named Tera who we razz mercilessly with it.  Really we were just waiting for someone or something totally freaking awesome to the max to knock the Caramel Apple Pops out of our collective mouths with a scalable, affordable, Linux-based game changer.  We dream big here, and apparently so do the sainted souls over @ Backblaze.

Holy mother of backups, ya done good ladies n’ gents. Not only did you just kick the can of storage capability and affordability forward a few city blocks in one neat punt, for the average human… you made the world a better place. Granted we haven’t even finished our ninth pot of coffee here yet, but we’ve been nose-to-monitor on the Backblaze blog all morning like Jobs on the tablet dev team . If you are into storage porn like we are, then just stop reading this now and go here.  Grab some tissues first though. (To wipe away the tears of JOY, you perv!!)

For those of you still with us… hello? Fuck. Well we’re used to talking to ourselves. No biggie. Anyway, what Backblaze has done is provide a TRULY affordable and relatively easy to assemble/maintain 67TB storage pod for under $8k. That puts the practical cost of a PETABYTE at approximately $120,000, which is roughly 4% of what the same amount of storage would cost in the AMZN CLOUD. But low cost is usually attacked as ‘not as good’ by the premium merchants of any commodity. Sometimes they have a point. In this case, they don’t. The meatiest paragraph from Backblaze’s blog post should break this down nicely. (our emphasis added)

Starting at the bottom, there are 45 hard drives exposed through the SATA controllers. We then use the fdisk tool on Linux to create one partition per drive. On top of that, we cluster 15 hard drives into a single RAID6 volume with two parity drives (out of the 15). The RAID6 is created with the mdadm utility. On top of that is the JFS file system, and the only access we then allow to this totally self-contained storage building block is through HTTPS running custom Backblaze application layer logic in Apache Tomcat 5.5. After taking all this into account, the formatted (usable) space is 87 percent of the raw hard drive totals. One of the most important concepts here is that to store or retrieve data with a Backblaze Storage Pod, it is always through HTTPS. There is no iSCSI, no NFS, no SQL, no Fibre Channel. None of those technologies scales as cheaply, reliably, goes as big, nor can be managed as easily as stand-alone pods with their own IP address waiting for requests on HTTPS.

So Backblaze didn’t just go for maximum storage at the minimum price, they learned every lesson of the past and took note of every mistake that came before them to ensure an ultra stable and reliable building block on the way to petabyte heaven. We’re not joking when we say that our mouths water when we think of the possibilities. The term ‘game changer‘ is just completely over-applied these days to anyone who happens to innovate a new layer onto an existing service or technology. Backblaze has baked up their own storage baklava and served it up hot and piping to the masses. Petabyte storage is not only POSSIBLE for individuals and smaller business entities now, it’s HERE. Your biggest worry is now the cost of the electricity to power this sucker.

As noted by the Backblaze team, they are standing on the shoulders of giants and they credit everyone involved in this epic achievement. That’s always nice to see. One day in the surprisingly not too far away future, there will be a blog post that includes a picture of a multi-petabyte array compared with the then current SanDisk 4YB (yottabyte) card for your brain dock, exclaiming “Can you believe how much space a PETABYTE used to take up! Hahahaha!” People in the future can be real assholes sometimes. That’s why we stopped time traveling. Too hard on the ego. Still… big ups to the team at Backblaze for dragging us a good piece further into that future than anyone else in the past year or so. Good on ya’ peeps.

“Anybody. Anyone who has any dissenting opinion, please speak.”

- Jim Jones

OK, this summer I’ve been to a lot of different places. My kitchen. My bathroom. The neighbors’ back yard. My bathroom again. The parents’ house. The gas station. Chipotle. In each place it’s become obvious how much microblogging hasn’t taken over the world. On every tech blog it seems like every tech blogger is drinking the microblogging koolaide. (sic)

The Kool-Aid analogy is particularly apt, as most people who use it in conversation or in their writing, reach for it as a shorthand method of referencing the bandwagon effect that human beings are indeed prone to when influenced in either a clever, subtle sniper shot sort of way, or a hamfisted, shotgun blast to the dome kind of  way.  The fruit flavored shout out alludes to the Jonestown massacre, which was  perpetrated by an superfreak named Jim Jones in Guyana, circa 1978.  This mass suicide, driven by deliberate social isolation combined with Jones’ special brand of brainwashing and mind control ended with 909 people knocking back dixie cups full of Flavor-Aid spiked with sedatives and cyanide.  While combing through the aftermath, authorities began to discover notes left behind by the members of Jones’ flock. Perhaps the most chilling of all was from a woman named Annie Moore.  It read in part: “JONESTOWN—the most peaceful, loving community that ever existed.”  Perspective sure can be a bitch.

So why is this offhand reference so illustrative re: the ongoing technorati microblogging circle jerk?  Because as we have seen throughout history… hype + isolation = bullshit.  It leads to statements like “Microblogging service X has taken over the business world and this should be very worrying for other companies like Google, Yelp, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and others.”  Let’s just break that down for fun, shall we?

Unsubstantiated statement of pure hype #1: “Microblogging service X has taken over the business world.”  No, actually.  It hasn’t.  Disagree?  Well, then please define the concept of ‘taken over’ in this context as well as the definition of ‘business world.’  No matter what your job is or what country you reside in, you can immediately see how this statement is so vague and leading that it self-destructs on even a cursory examination.  We will concede willingly that a shockingly large number of massive corporate entities have indeed leapt, P/E ratio first, into the sweet, sticky trough of glorified status updates. But ‘taken over the business world.”?  More like ‘temporarily wrested the M$M’s obsession with social media away from Facebook.’  Sounds much less impressive that way, doesn’t it?

Unsubstantiated statement of pure hype #2: “…this should be very worrying for other companies like Google, Yelp, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and others.”  Really?  Very worrying? That would be like Dwight Howard, Yao Ming, Pau Gasol, Zydrunas Ilgauskas and Joakim Noah being ‘worried’ about Steve Nash.  Will they pop out to help double or even triple team Capt. Canada once in a while?  Sure. They might even throw an elbow in the paint when they have to.  But, my dear, sweet, globetrotting (see what I did there?), twat-o-phant… nobody is worried.  Not even for an internet second.  In fact, in my own personal experience, I’ve found that it’s helpful to look less at the individial(s) who are being pointed out, and instead look to the owner of the finger doing the pointing.  Who’s zoomin who here, Scobelicious?  Why so hyperbolic?  Let’s dig a little deeper. (And stop pointing.  It’s rude.)

Unsubstantiated statement of pure hype #3: “Twitter is underhyped. I’m now convinced that Twitter has locked up a whole raft of businesses and that Twitter is actually worth five to 10 billion dollars.”  First of all. LOL!  This is where they Jonestown analogy really comes around full circle. There are other analogies, of course, that would work fine.  Before we continue though, be aware…  you are about to enter another dimension. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Scoble Zone.  We now return you to your regularly scheduled mass suicide of rational, reasoned thought and practical objectivity

Please tell me, in what universe could Microblogging service X EVER be considered by a sane person to be ‘underhyped’?  Wait that was rhetorical… plus you’re reading right now so stop talking to yourself and pay attention.  This is the most important part.  (tw)It can only be seen as ‘underhyped’ by an individual who has spent months at a clip, completely and willingly subsumed by overblown and ultra-saturated hyper-branding combined with corporate ingratiation, glad-handing and tushie smooching of epic proportions.  Clearly the author is flitting exclusively from one corporate royal family to the next like a self-perceived cybernetic Ben Frank on a mission from The One True Biz, spreading the good word… 140 characters at a time.  Like many missionaries before him, he overstates the wonder of his God and the beneficence that awaits true converts.  Mostly he does this because it works.  Know who else got down like that?  Jimmy “Flavor-Aid” Jones, that’s who.

In much the same way that we felt a twisted pang of pity for Jones, all mixed up with disgust, revulsion, outrage and anger as we watched flies land on the lifeless faces of his sacrificed flock, we also can’t help but feel badly for anyone so spun out and wonkified by the smoke being lovingly blown up their ass that they have begun to resemble a parody of a caricature of themselves.

As Michael Arrington said in June of `08: “Is MySpace worth $3 billion, or $20 billion? It depends on how you value a user.” F’n A, Mike… I am SO buying a CrunchPad.

So how much exactly is your average user of Microblogging service X worth?  We haven’t the foggiest. Neither does the Scobinator.  Neither does Arrington.  Neither does Biz.  Neither do you.  After all we ARE talking about a service that sputtered to life around mid-2006 and never stopped… sputtering that is.  Stronger and more vital sites/services have seen their glory days whiz past like a B’more beat junkie beating feet to a Blaqstarr showcase @ SXSW. In six months time, the select few who have anointed their favorite toy as the savior of mankind will have become bored with their prize possession and will have moved on to something shinier, newer, bigger, better, faster, more…  what’s goin’ on?  Hype baby.. hype.  Round and round and round it goes.  When it flops, everyone knows.

We ain’t mad at’cha though, Scober-doodle.  Hype gotta grind just like coitus, power and cash money.  They rule everything around us.  Just don’t let any one of them own you instead of the other way around.  If you get wrapped up in hype too completely you can end up going down hard with the good ship folly flop.  Valuations come and go along with popular trends and opinions.  Common sense and impartiality are forever.

Kneel before Zod or run through the jungle.  Neither is a particularly attractive choice.  If Jimmy J had taken a vacation once in a blue moon, maybe his follwers wouldn’t have had to make it at all.  The truth is though, he believed his own bullshit and that’s where the downward spiral started.  Valuate unknown quantities all you want, just whatever you do, don’t believe your own bullshit.

“You ought to be with me, anyway.”

- Al Green

Swindle hits us in the hot place, regularly, but chak has been sleepin’ on him for a while so when we checked back and saw that he had hooked up with Frank Lyon for what might be the most massive mashup in recent musical history we were hardly surprised.  We were, however, completely and totally blown out by the concept alone.  In one of the finest cases ever of something adding up to more than the sum of its parts, the Al Green/Nas mix is off the cheezy fo’ sheezy plus it keeps our ears breezy.

It really seems like everything post Danger Mouse has been mostly about dialing the BPM up or down and smashing instead of mashing.  The mixes here are not only deftly clever, they are subtle where they need to be and never, ever forced.  Lyon is able to pull back and blend specific elements of each at appropriate times, without making the mix ever sound too busy or confused.  This often results in a complete redefinition of both songs being used, which for our money, is the ultimate compliment to a DJ.  The hacks and grinders just match up beats and let it fly.  Steelers like Swindle & Lyon craft entirely new compositions, using horn stabs and vocal refrains the same way Ray Johnson used Lucky Strike logos and cash money.  Smack it up, flip it and rub it down… they made me look. We’re all slaves to the page in Swindle’s vibe book.

Track List:

1. One Love/Call Me
2. Life’s A Bitch/Funny How Time Slips Away
3. One Mic/You Ought To Be With Me
4. It Ain’t Hard To Tell/Here I Am
5. Made You Look/Love And Happiness
6. Oochie Wally/Right Now, Right Now
7. Rewind/Tired Of Being Alone
8. Fast Life/Wait Here
9. Streets Of N.Y./Belle

Artist Site | Sendspace | Demonoid | MySpace | Amazon | DatPiff

“It would be a terrific innovation if you could get your mind to stretch a little further than the next wisecrack.”
- Katie Hepburn

Innovation by degrees is pretty much how things progress most of the time.  Great leaps of knowledge and/or accomplishment are rare, but usually much more memorable than the scintillas of ground gained daily in any given area of focus.  There are innumerable ways to kick the can forward a millimeter or two if one so desires.  One of the most common could generally be referred to as the Bizarro technique.  It works like this.  Find a successful idea, business or service.. and do the exact opposite – be it stylistically, content-wise or even context-wise.  With the utter captivation displayed lately by all flavors of media for ‘microblogging’, is it any surprise that we are now witnessing the rearing of ‘macroblogging’s ugly head?  Well… a little bit maybe.

The reason business models like this get funded is the same reason we see mostly sequels coming out of the major motion picture studios across the globe.  It refers back to what’s generally regarded as a ‘known quantity.’  IRL speak that means “_____ business made a profit or is on its way to profitability. Let’s just rip that idea off.”  Of course, deftly done, ventures like this can be quite successful.  Clumsily executed they can instead be transient, ineffective and even off-putting to their intended target audience.

Our favorite by far is Posterous.  chak hates sign ups with a passion so it was a pleasant surprise to see how easy the Posterous team has made it to get an account going.  In fact there IS NO sign up process which made us giggle like Peter Lorre in M.  It might have been the whippets we were doing at the time but we have to admit that once you hit the main page of Posterous it’s hard to not want to give it a try.  The UI and entire initial experience is just intuitive and fun, which is oh so rare on the Tubes these days.

To get yourself started, send an email to post@posterous.com.  Anything you include will go into your first post.  Send a pic, video, txt, audio or your favorite malware .exe on up and then watch the magic propagate.  Of course, flying out of the gate smoothly is all for naught if somebody set the hurdles up wrong.  From what we can tell so far, the Posterous team nailed the reeling-in aspect in addition to the hook `em aspect.  Changing any aspect of your account or posts is clear and easy to find with a smart and uncluttered interface, color scheme and work flow.  Usually we found things in the first or second place we looked for them.  Want to create a password protected account?  Change your user name? Layover your own domain?  Add Google Analytics?  No probs at all.  Will we use it on a regular basis?  Probably not.  But it’s clear that the team behind this puppy is bursting with flavor and coming out swinging.  We can always respect that.  Keep the honey drippin’ Posterous.  We’ll be back to lick it up l8rs.

Toobla on the other hand… oh Toobla. What in the name of dear sweet Berners-Lee are ya doin’ over there?  Man we TRIED to figure this sucker out but there’s just not much there.  What IS there didn’t work too well for us.  The basic concept behind Toobla (as far as we can tell) is to sort and confine all of your material into folders.  Yep, that’s right.  When you first sign up, you have an “All My Stuff”, “My Photos” and “My Videos” folder.  Sweet!  Just like Windows 95!  Tell me more!  No wait.. don’t.

Also we appreciate minimalism but Toobla takes things a little far with no user nudging or experience shaping what-so-ever.  You are left to your own devices with one AJAX Feedback tab, an all purpose ‘Add’ button and a walkthrough being the only consumer facing top/nav links.  It’s not an ugly site, and it’s not super difficult to use, there’s just not much there.  Lastly, the one folder we created, called ‘Books’ into which we imported our Shelfari collection never generated a preview image.  It’s just a blank white rectangle with no books inside.  Our suggestion ladies and gentooblamen is to have a standard placeholder image for any folder that fails to generate a thumbnail.  Even a picture of say… we don’t know… a FOLDER?  We backed away slowly and just left poor Toobla to its own devices.  We’ll check back later and hope the technical difficulties are just birthing pains.

imindi (eye-mind-eye… get it?), while unfortunately named, does sport some cool features.  Like Posterous, they make sign up as easy as emailing them, but it’s a more standard ‘activation link’ process which suits us fine.  Once in the site things are set up in a ‘think tank’ form.  It’s really just another way to label topics of discussion from “Art & Creativity” to “Innovation & Technology”, but it’s an effective choice of differentiation that struck us as at the very least – slightly clever.  It affords your contributions an aura of authority whether they contain one or not.  I mean.. I’m adding to a THINK TANK.  Usually we just add to the drunk tank so it’s a nice change.  Once you get past that though there’s not a lot of depth to imindi, but perhaps this is really due more to the tender age of the service.  Also they had a rough road to launch so we’ll cut them some slack.  One last thing we really appreciate is the full-on HTML editor provided for the meat of your submissions.  We’d like to have more than five words for our micro-headline but we have noticed that it does force the user into penning haiku like headers.  We’re big haiku fans here at chak… especially dirty haiku.  Just makes us happy.

What?

Last up is an even more problematically named service that takes the Bizarro business model technique to a dangerously, if entertainingly lazy place. Generally referred to as “Woofer” in press relases, comment sections and blog write ups everywhere, the URL is in fact – woofertime.com – which just confuses us to no end.  Sure you can Bingle it but making your brand different from your actual URL is risky bidness ioo.  Never the less, Woofer gets the award for biggest LOL when you first hit the front page.  They decided to take the ‘parody’ route and stick as close to Twatter’s design as possible.  This is an important distinction to make as some tech journos are already crying foul and saying that Woofer has placed itself in an actionable position re: StoneCo.  We don’t think so.  There is a long and illustrious history of parodies using mimicry as part of their freedom of expression.  In fact, if the Woofer team had tried to lift only PART of the most popular microblogging design in the universe then perhaps they would get a friendly cease and desist email.  As is though, they have differentiated themselves by offering a Twatclone of the macro variety.  If you can grasp one you can grasp the other, and that’s the smartest part of Woofer.  Anyone sour griping about the design is just jealous they didn’t think of it first.

Having said that, beyond that initial fun factor – for us the appeal is limited.  Still we’re happy to see Woofer barking up Biz’s tree if only for the lulz.

So if we had to recommend ONE of these services to futz around with we can heartily say that Posterous is the most fun, easy to use and useful of these sites.  That’s not a compliment really since all of these sites are utterly superfluous and will mostly likely be gone within years if not months.  It’s a bit like crowning one pickled egg the king of the pickled egg jar.  The number of people who care about pickled eggs is pretty limited in the first place (specifically to professional fire eaters, the Pennsylvania Dutch and any drunk, starving person who has run out of other options).  Most people walk right by that dirty screw-top jar at the end of the bar, and rightfully so.  Thankfully, macroblogging won’t make your farts lethal or stain your fingers a funny color.  Now THAT would be REAL innovation.

“Everything popular is wrong.” – Oscar Wilde.

Oscar Wilde is popular. Think that one over.  Yyyyoink!  Of course maxims aren’t truths and vice versa but they often stab at the heart of truth with their steely words and if O-dogg was alive and kickin right now he would be agog over the fickle and supercilious nature of what gets published as supposedly cogent reporting of ‘facts.’  Case in point, the most recent ‘death’ of The Pirate Bay.

What sets this particular round of wrongheaded reporting apart is the clear and vicious bias it exposed among the technorati, who all too quickly trumpeted the demise of the `net’s most recognizable galleon.  It’s as if, every time TPB re-balances their load, those licking their chops for another corpse on the pile sprint up to the base of the mountain with their pitchforks and rope, keen for a techno-lynching.  Frankly, it’s disgusting.

We all have our own views on the currently morphing state of copyright across the globe.  But we’re not talking about personal opinions here, we’re talking about people who get paid to write accurate, pertinent content for some of the most well read sites in the world.  How then can they get a story SO wrong?

One theory we have is that torrenting and any entity involved has been so successfully demonized by big business and the corporate elite that any mention of it draws an immediate and negative reaction, before the facts have even been considered.  The Pirate Bay is a sign of contradiction.  If you align yourself with it publicly, get ready to be ridiculed, talked down to, treated like a child and/or generally disdained by your fellow man.  It is a symbol of what many feel is everything that’s ‘wrong with the world.’  It is seen as the shiniest example of the Old Boss losing control and the New Bosses taking back their rightful reins.  Anytime, anywhere that any kind of control is usurped from a centralized conduit and scattered to the masses, you will there see every kind of lie, distortion and obfuscation from those who stand to lose control.  It’s their last resort and often it works.  Thankfully, the team behind TPB foresaw this a long time ago and acted to prevent control from ever being wrested away from the TRUE people in charge…. that is to say – you and me.  Even those who rush to judgment and trumpet the death of TPB while the next head of the pirate hydra springs up to take the last one’s place.. even they will benefit from the way The Pirate Bay has now insinuated itself into the very fabric of reality.  They are single handedly fulfilling the promise of THE INTERNET and they are, unsurprisingly, getting a face full of shit for it.  True innovators are usually rejected out of hand.   Or if you are more of a Swift/Reilly person… “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”

Who are the dunces in this equation?  We’re tempted to just list every dummy who thought that this was ‘the end’ for TPB but we’ll be nice.  Things DO change quickly but please take note… change is irrelevant to a distributed p2p system that is set up properly and with a forward looking attitude.  The technology to make a tracker impervious has existed for a while.  It just took this particular group of people to implement it correctly and to have the Swedish Meatballs fat enough to not let an email from a lawyer put their skivvies in a bunch.

Additionally, if the TPB team decided right now to flick off the servers, walk away and fade into the sunset.. The Pirate Bay would STILL live forever in two ways.

#1 – Mirrors.  The most well known right now would probably be BTArena.net.  But the TPB database is backed up in countless places across the globe, by dedicated and loyal users who recognize the immense and irreplaceable value it provides.  It’s here, don’t fear, get used to it.

#2 – Legacy.  The path that TPB blazed for others is all too apparent by just looking around these days.  Micro-blogging will be dead, as a concept, within two years.  p2p and torrenting will live forever in one form or another, largely because of what TPB has accomplished. Places like 1337x, H33t, Demonoid, et. al have not only grabbed the baton and sprinted off in their own directions, the technology behind torrents has evolved to the point that we expect it to gain sentience within a decade.  Torrage, Miro and OpenBitTorrent are three great examples.  There are dozens more.

Granted some of these concepts can be heady for the little ol’ tech journo-bot out there trying his/her best to crank out a few paragraphs between runs to Coffee Bean and their chiropractor, but we have a crib sheet  for you to print out and keep handy for those times when deadline is staring you in the face and you just want to fill out that Fbook quiz while you IM back and forth with your best friend about which theme is best for her birthday party…  if it was us, we would stay away from the Pimps and Hoes thing.  It’s been done to death and unintentional irony can be SUCH a sad thing to witness.  Besides someone will take a pic w/their cam-phone and put it on their Orkut page just to job-block you.  Bitches.

Here’s your crib sheet.

1. TPB will never die.
2. Truth is stranger than fiction.
3. Everything popular is wrong.
4. See #1

I got too tired a long time ago to keep looking up every quote I ever saw attributed to Sam Clemens.  The guy is misquoted more often than Yogi & Gandhi combined.  So let’s just agree that great truths transcend misquotes and get to the heart of the matter.

Dear tech journalists of Earth… have you lost your fucking minds? Wait, don’t check your micro-blogging account or your friend feed for the answer.  I can tell you right now that… yes… yes you have lost your fucking minds.

Now I’m the LAST person to expect glorified bloggers to adhere to the hard and fast rules of Journalistic integrity… especially when they are competing to be the first to post, first to know, first to crow, first to… whatever.  I can even forgive the total and complete lack of an editorial chain on most of the larger sites, but what I simply cannot abide is the slavering, child-like obsession for products/services/companies being covered in a supposedly ‘professional’ manner.

Again, let me not be unclear. It’s FINE to be a cheerleader for your favorite stuff in the world. That’s how it’s supposed to work.  But when you allow the limited niche culture of something along the lines of… say… the aforementioned ’status update gone wild’ to utterly consume you to the point that you no longer make sense IRL then… you get this.

Now if you are currently in the throes of a personality addiction like so many virtual souls swooshing through the intertubes daily then you will probably find this kind of information useful… but is it REALLY helpful in any way, to anyone… anywhere?  Not so much.  Apologies to the slab of circular vinyl I’m rending asunder but yes I DO understand that this is viewed as a relevant topic by many due to the ubiquitous inculcation of micro-blogging into social culture, on AND offline.  When you dream about re-tweeting your dreams then you’ve gone through the looking glass, down the rabbit hole and straight into the Mad Hatter’s front vest pocket.

I inquire of you now, tech journalists of planet Earth…. I beseech you…  HAVE YOU NO SENSE OF PROFESSIONAL CONDUCT?  Well?  DO YOU?

One of the favorite topics to banter about online currently is that of the long, slow, slide of the Mammoth Music Industry into the tar pits of  technological history.  Feel no pity for them.  They saw the pitfalls clearly and were first warned by smaller, smarter and more nimble creatures to stay away.  Then they even ignored the Sabre Tooth Tigers prowling the edge to get up close and stick a toe in.  Reap the whirlwind, bitches.  But which butterfly flapped its wing to get that whole chaos cluster-fuck started?  The Jobus A-la-cartus… that’s the little bugger.

You see… once upon a time… the Mammoth Music Industry was very, very, VERY smitten by this butterfly.  He alighted on their big, crusty ear and whispered sweet nothings of a digital future to them.  They were enchanted by his concept of moving out of the tar one little bit at a time.  The Mammoth had spent his whole life thrashing like mad whenever he got caught in a trap.  Why?  Because it was effective 99.9% of the time.  Would YOU want to fuck with a Thrashing Mammoth? (Great band name by the way.. you can have that one.  It’s on me.)  But this current wicket was far more sticky than those of the past.  The Mammoth was just beginning to realize how deep the tar pits were and now their whole FOOT was gummed up in this shit. They would be damned if they were gonna sink into this goopy mess they didn’t understand.  That’s where the Jobus A-la-cartus came in and really saved the day.. or so the Mammoth thought.  The friendly, little, turtlenecked, bespectacled bugger merely advised switching from the long honored way of removing oneself from a mess.  “Don’t do it 18.99 at a time.” the butterfly said..  “Do it .99 at a time!  See?  Your little toe is already looking more free!  Trust me dude.. this is gonna be great for both of us!”  Then the butterfly flew to a nearby branch and laughed his ass off at the stupid Mammoth.

How and why could/would a delicate little butterfly be so cruel you ask?  Well you see.. this particular butterfly prefers the flesh of Mammoths for sustenance and he had just ensured himself enough Mammoth meat to grow an entire Mammoth sized colony of Jobus A-la-cartus for generations.  Where all the other animals of the forest and/or jungle had failed in their attempt to take on the Mammoth, the butterfly just waited until the Mammoth got close enough to the edge and then tried to see the world from the Mammoth’s perspective.  Wait until it’s in a slightly panicked state and then make it an offer it thinks it can’t refuse.

But more importantly.. why oh WHY would the Mammoth not thrash at some point and at least fight back?  That one is easy.  It’s because the Mammoth is utterly transfixed by the soothing words, beautiful appearance and seemingly magical qualities of this particular species of insect.  This butterfly can do things that no butterfly could ever do before.  In fact the more Mammoth flesh the butterflies feed on the more cool features they seem to sprout.  The Mammoth was so taken by this that it just sat happily in the tar, sinking down further, all the while calling to the other large animals on the edge of the pit.. saying “Have you SEEN what these things can DO?  They have touch screens for god’s sake.. TOUCH SCREENS!”  All that time the butterfly was dining on its flesh, the Mammoth sung its praises and invited other animals to offer up their flesh to the beautifully cruel butterfly.  Many accepted that offer, and the butterfly colony became SO massive, SO dominant that other entire species sprang up around it, thriving off their excess of sweet flesh to dine on daily.  It’s really a beautiful thing, if you have a taste for Mammoth meat.

Currently the Mammoth still has its trunk and face above the surface of the tar but it’s an ugly, ugly site.  The butterflies have been feeding on Mammoth flesh for a while now and they are more beautiful than ever..  There’s no doubt about that.  They’re gorgeous, sexy, user friendly butterflies and they are pure fucking evil… IF you’re a Mammoth that is.  The real question is, what are they going to feed on when the big lug finally gives up the ghost?  The butterfly knows…  the butterfly grows.

Now consider the current state of tech journalism and ask yourself.  Who’s the Mammoth in this equation.. and who’s the butterfly?  If you allow yourself to be UTTERLY and completely seduced by something that you are supposed to have a professional separation from then you end up coming off like a gibbering baboon that’s just been handed a set of car keys.

I picked on the Crunchies specifically mostly because they (thankfully) have a pretty great sense of humor and are as self deprecating a bunch as you will find in this techno-journalistic circle jerk that’s owning so many eyes right now.  However when I saw Siegler’s post about the “Golden Ratio”, I almost dropped my dirty syringe into my bowl of oxys.  You just can’t let one service or even one BRAND of service rule your head so completely.  Yes, he has a totally legitimate point about who might or might not be better to follow but it’s the equivalent of writing an article about who it might make more sense to follow physically, on the street IRL.

“Look for people with a large, babbling crowd behind them…. as opposed to those trundling along at the back of the pack.”  /Palin wink.

Thanks for the tip, Em Geezy.  Now unsew your tongue from the back of Bizzy B’s y-fronts and get back to stuff like using “Bing” as a dirty verb and crushing on the Fail Whale.  We say this with love of course.  We just don’t want you to be led to the gallows by that cute little Bizzy B and step off a journalistic cliff b/c your head was in the clouds with your eyes adoring its anointed little innovative wings.  Also don’t get too seduced by that whole “Us online peeps don’t play by the same rules!” mantra that gets waved in the face of anyone who dares to demand some kind of accountability when it comes to the “online” word as opposed to the “traditional” word of a reporter.  That’s a bit like saying “Condoms don’t apply to me!  She told me her tubes were tied.  I’m good, baby.”  That feels great in the moment but a few years down the line you might look back and wish you had more staid, steady decorum.  As of late much of the tech related writing I see online reads more like a schoolgirl crush in full bloom.  Enthusiasm is key, but like Miles always said – it’s really more about the notes you DON’T play.

I’d hate to see the current crop of writers making their bones in this niche fall victim to the same fate as the Mammoth… simultaneously distracted and consumed by that which distracts you.